Summary

The federal government spends about $1 billion annually to ensure the safety and quality of the billions of meals consumed in America each year. This effort depends upon a fragmented, complex regulatory system involving as many as 35 different laws and 12 agencies. Inconsistencies and illogical differences between the agencies' approaches and enforcement authorities are undercutting the system's effectiveness. How often a food processing plant is inspected and what actions are taken to enforce food safety standards are determined not by a unified, comprehensive assessment of specific risks to public health but by the legislation that governs the responsible agency. Federal agencies responsible for food safety and quality inspections could use their resources more effectively by basing inspection frequencies on risk--the potential hazards associated with the product, process, and processors' compliance with federal regulations--and by eliminating duplicative inspections. Coordination agreements, under which agencies must notify other responsible agencies of problems they encounter during inspections, are not ensuring that food safety problems are corrected. Unsanitary or other unsafe conditions persist in food processing plants because such notifications do not always take place or because agency referrals are not always promptly investigated. Efforts to correct deficiencies in the federal food safety inspection system have fallen short because agencies continue to operate under different regulatory approaches and try to protect their own jurisdictions, thus limiting their responsiveness to changing eating habits and new safety issues, such as salmonella poisoning. A new structure for food safety inspection, one based on uniform enforcement authorities and an assessment of the risks that specific foods pose to public health, could help Congress oversee, fund, and enact legislation on the federal food safety inspection program.

GAO found that: (1) federal food inspection agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), have diverse regulatory approaches to inspecting foods that pose similar health risks; (2) food inspection agencies operate under differing enforcement authorities that in some cases adversely affect their ability to protect public health; (3) food processing firms under FDA jurisdiction are not required to register, making it difficult for FDA to identify all firms under its jurisdiction; (4) some food inspection agencies focus too much attention on low-risk products, while providing insufficient oversight for higher-risk food products; (5) FSIS has the legal authority to implement discretionary, risk-based inspections, but has not done so because of public and industry opposition to its proposed implementing regulations; (6) some food establishments are inspected by more than one agency, resulting in duplication of effort and wasted inspection resources; (7) while the food inspection agencies have entered into over 25 agreements to coordinate their efforts, agencies frequently do not make required referrals or notifications of problems they discover; and (8) those referrals that agencies do make do not always lead to timely investigations by the appropriate agency. GAO also identified three alternative approaches to revamping the food safety inspection system, including creating a single agency to administer a uniform set of food safety laws, creating a uniform set of food safety laws to be administered by the current agencies, and developing a model for a risk-based inspection system.